GRIGSBY, Joan S.

£300 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Orchid Door: Ancient Korean Poems. First edition of the first English-language anthology of Korean poetry. Grigsby adapted and reworded literal translations of the poems provided by Dr James Gale and Jessie McLaren, herself a collector of rare Korean literature. There is no evidence it was ever commercially distributed in Europe or America and it is scarce in commerce. Joan Grigsby (1891-1937) was a Canadian poet who lived in both Japan and Korea. Upon receiving Gale and McLaren's literal translations she decided to poeticize the style, as she believed the shift from Sinitic characters to the Latin alphabet removed "a wealth of color, light and sound" (p. 23) from the originals. The reinvention of the poetry was such that it can also be seen as the fourth volume of her own poetic opus.

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